Sunday, 14 December 2014

If
the history of this century has been about anything so far, then it is the bargain of
national security. A constant state of war carried out on a need-to-know basis.

Our
governments of various political hues, the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, have constantly asked
for, even demanded, our trust. We're keeping you safer, trust us. We're acting
within the law, trust us. We need the powers we ask for (and many more you
don't know about), trust us.

The
shocking report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture activities
has revealed one tiny corner of the truth, one tiny corner of the misery the
US - and by collusion its allies - has unleashed on the world.

News outlets have
shied away from describing the atrocities contained in it for what they
actually are. I can't. It's rape, kidnap, mental cruelty, thuggery, torture and
murder.

Once and for all, this report shows how flawed that bargain of national security
has become. The trust we have been asked to have in the war on terror and the
rush to mass surveillance has been dangerously misplaced.

The
report is full of instances where the public and their elected representatives
have been lied to.

The CIA claimed that these “enhanced techniques” led to
useful information, preventing terrorist attacks. The committee found that in
no case examined was this true. Not one.

CIA Deputy Director of Operations
James Pavitt told the Senate Intelligence committee in 2001 they would be
informed of each individual who entered CIA custody. Didn't happen.

Pavitt
denied torture, and in 2002 denied existence of a detention facility. Lies.

The
CIA lied about the number of people detained. They lied about videotaping of
interrogations. They lied about using starvation. They lied about using sleep
deprivation to medically damaging extent.

The
idea that we should take the security services' word at face value after this
is not just laughable, it's obscene.

In
lots of places, coverage of the report has been rather warped by the CIA's point
of view.

It was presented that the failure had mainly been that the torture was
ineffective. In other words, that if it had been effective, then it might have been
worth persevering with the anal rehydration and simulated drownings.

To my
mind that is obviously monstrous.

What
this has done, though, has been to dispel the Jack Bauer, 24 fantasy that for our spooks
the ends justify the means and can be made to do so within a very strict
timeframe with space for adverts.

The constant claim has been that lives have
been saved, and therefore complaining about collateral damage was naive or
dangerous.

We now know that those claims have been made falsely in the past and
there is no need to take them as true without question in the future.

Equally,
the notion that this was done by a few “bad apples” has also been stripped
away.

Far from being a few rogue agents, this torture programme was devised by
contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

They formed a company
worth $180m, and received $81m in payouts over seven years. This shows that
abuse was planned, systemic and well-funded.

In
all the detail of the report, as journalist Trevor Timm pointed out, there is
one case that seems to sum up that whole miserable saga.

Gul Rahman was
tortured at the CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, he was chained to the
floor and froze to death.

Footnote 32 explains curtly, “Gul Rahman, another case
of mistaken identity.” A human life, someone who lived, loved and was loved, ended up as a footnote by mistake.

The
favourite go to phrase for the mass surveillance lobby is that if you have
nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.

Clearly, Gul Ruhman had everything to
fear, freezing to death as a footnote in history. In
the globalised war on terror, we can all fear becoming another fatal footnote.

Of course, some of us more than others. Currently, Muslims and people of Middle Eastern origin.

But until the government and mainstream parties truly face up
to what they have done, until we have a proper inquiry in the UK, and until the release of the Chilcot Report, then the powers that be deserve our fear, not our trust.

Thursday, 11 December 2014

This article is not about Rolling Stone or the University of Virginia. Nor is this an anti-American piece; one could say plenty about the United Kingdom.

The rape culture in the United States consists in the staggering prevalence of even quite casual references to heterosexual and homosexual rape as a way of referring to domination and humiliation.

And, for that matter, in the staggering prevalence of even quite casual references to domination and humiliation themselves. Why do so many things have to be framed in those terms?

A sports team, even a school one, only has to beat its rival for it to be said to have "raped" the other side.

Whether playfully or menacingly, a heterosexual man will state his intention to make another heterosexual man his "bitch", which sounds hilariously gay to British ears.

Over here, calling a man a "bitch" is done only by the kind of men who refer to each other as "she", a small minority even of gay men, high camp to the point of social and cultural separatism.

"Faggot" means something quite different, and now rather obscure, in Britain, where it otherwise still sounds American on the rare occasions that it is heard. But it is an insult of first resort in America.

It is true that "bugger" and "sod" are treated as mild, and even quaintly old-fashioned, profanities on these shores, scarcely more serious than "bloody". But that is because their use is entirely divorced from their original meaning, of which, in the case of "sod", most people are probably unaware.

Americans even say "f**k you" instead of "f**k off". They manage to shock even those of us who are quite hardened to these things, by addressing the c-word to women, something that almost never happens in Britain.

Indeed, that word seems to be addressed mostly to women, such that its use against men, which is nearly its only use among Britons, would presumably sound odd to Americans.

Most bizarre of all to the rest of us are those invitations to suck the genitals of men or boys who, like those to whom they issue those invitations, are assumed to be of the most unimpeachable heterosexuality.

Lurking behind all of this, and not very far in its background, is the horrific level of prison rape in the United States.

That is part of the general harshness of the American penal system, and it is connected to the very lengthy sentences that are handed down there as a matter of routine.

Prison rape happens in Britain, but it is far less common, and it is certainly not something that mainstream entertainment regularly uses for comedic purposes.

Fear of being raped seems to be seen as part of the deterrent value of the American system of mass incarceration, itself so integral to American economic and political activity that its subcultural features are prominent as points of normal cultural reference.

And there would be no fear of being raped in prison unless it were known as a day-to-day fact of life that men truly were being raped in prison.

Meanwhile, other, although not unrelated, forces compel that huge numbers of people, especially men, and most especially young and non-white men (categories that are in any case depicted in hypersexualised ways), have to spend often prolonged periods inside that system.

As we saw first at Abu Ghraib and now also in the Senate report on torture, the American Republic has taken to using sexual violence as an official weapon of war, in at least the latter case with full approval all the way up to the very top of the Bush Administration.

That Administration was not the first, of either party, to have been steeped in fraternities and related organisations, the likes of Skull and Bones, that are as baffling when seen from this side of the Atlantic as is the not unconnected system of legacy admissions.

The strongly sexual aspect of that kind of thing, even if not actually violent or non-consensual, is nevertheless as coercive and exploitative of the men involved as it is of the women.

Being rich and, although Americans would delude themselves and dispute the term, being posh do not make one any older than one is in actual fact.

Still only in their late teens and desperate to fit in, as well as often having a family tradition to keep up, these men are told that this is how to do so.

Products of what in itself is this wildly atypical milieu wield vastly disproportionate economic, social, cultural and political influence.

Thus is rape really quite central to even humdrum American cultural expression.

If there is in fact a huge incidence of sexual violence in general in the United States, then that is hardly surprising.

Saturday, 6 December 2014

When I look at the prevailing
threats to democracy, not least from the EU, the IMF and ever since 1951 in
Iran, the United States, I wonder if we are approaching a turning point, just
as the Roman Republic did when it became too unwieldy to match vested
interests, and became an Empire.

When I recently stood for the
Compass Management Committee I issued the following supporting statement:

As a democrat,

(1)I am a member of
the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, with a preference for STV,

(2)I believe, along
with Unite, my union, that the TTIP should be torn up. There are in fact likely to be disadvantages
for lower-than-median incomes: this is a multinational stitch-up, which will
also represent a neo-colonial blueprint for future deals with the Third World.

(2)To my mind the
Euro cannot work. It attracts wealth to
the centre, i.e. Germany,
and those on the periphery inevitably lose out.
Certainly their problems cannot be overcome with fantasy and neo-liberal
panaceas.

In fact, CAPITALISM IS A CANCER and in particular we
must dismantle the neo-liberalism of the EU.

As regards democracy, I could say
a lot about STV as an effective mechanism for choosing the choices, including
preferred candidates within a party, and I feel the key thing wrong with the
TTIP and its like is that in a world where there are so many dangers to the
environment, standardising regulations with somebody who is climate-change
denier half the time – i.e. the US - is something we need like a hole in the
head, let alone the ozone-layer.

I would like to turn to my
statement that the Euro “attracts wealth to the centre, i.e. Germany, and those on the periphery
inevitably lose out.” In a blog three
years ago, in 2011, I argued that the Euro was inherently unsound. I stated:

However I have a further objection [to the question of
economic heterogeneity], which to my
mind is extremely serious: I feel that when you have an economic area operating
under a market economy, wealth will always flow from the periphery to an economic
centre of gravity. This leads to lower inflation at the centre and a
depreciation of currencies at the periphery. This is apparent in Europe, and we
also see for example in the Antipodes that the
New Zealand Dollar slowly but inexorably depreciates against the Australian
Dollar...

As I felt at the time, the
deficit in Greece, among other countries, has not gone away, and indeed there
is concern about economic heterogeneity that spans the political spectrum from
left to right in this and many countries. But now I feel it time to look at the
statistical evidence. The following
graph relates the depreciation of various mainly Western countries’ currencies
against the Deutsche Mark, versus the distance of the capitals from Frankfurt. This is
the 16-year period 1963-1999, the eve of the Euro:

Two curves
are shown, the green fitted to all countries in the EU in 1999, on the eve of
the Euro, and the white one fitted to the original signatories to the Treaty of
Rome in 1958. (SF is Finland.) Germany is not part of the fit,
since the rise against itself would have to be +0% and the distance perhaps
zero. Where the curve goes through +0%
could be an average distance within Germany
from Frankfurt, either in geographic,
population or economic terms. Here it is
around 250-265m, reasonably consistent with my own calculation of 215km for the
mean, which would go up to 260km with re-unification, though this latter covers
only the last nine years of this period.

Now these
curves are perhaps the simplest curve fit, which is known as a log-linear
fit. Let us look at the example of two
countries, one which is twice the distance of the other from Frankfurt,
at least at the capitals. We have Italy, where Rome
is 959km from Frankfurt, whereas Paris
is 471km. And Athens
is 1804km from Frankfurt, almost twice that of Rome.
Let us look at the change in currency values for Greece and Italy: in 1962, the Drachma was
worth 20.83 Lire, but in 1999 it was worth only 6.42 Lire, well below half its
previous value. The white curve,
extended as yellow beyond the original six signatories, gives a halving time of
25 years for countries where one country is half the distance of the other from
Frankfurt.
In 1987, the Drachma was worth 9.80 Lire, just under half its 1962
value. Both currencies lie close to this
curve.

In fact we
have a very straightforward idea: double
the distance, halve the strength.
For the green curve the halving rate is roughly 33 years.

Now clearly
there is not enough data to refute the hypothesis of halving times related to
distances from a centre of gravity.
There are indeed irregularities.
But we may also note that the graph suggests that the Netherlands exerts a pull on Belgium, and also Spain
on Portugal,
since in each case one is above the curve line and the other below, or much
closer to the curve line.

The graph
also shows that the more recent a country’s accession to the EU, the less their
currencies have fallen. All countries
acceding after the first six in 1958 – with the exception of the UK -
have depreciations above the white line, and countries that acceded 1994
onwards are well above both lines. This
suggests that the greater the economic integration, the greater the
gravitational pull. Nevertheless one has
to be careful with this figure, since before accession, their circumstances
will be varied.

Now what we
can see here is that all the countries that have had deficit difficulties, i.e.
the ‘pigs’ - Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain – are those at the
bottom of the chart. It doesn’t matter
that they are on or above one of the curves, and Spain
and Ireland
are above both curves: a deficit is a deficit.
It is clear that the pressures to devalue in the latter half of last
century are still there, and that all the things that devaluation is meant to
avoid will still happen in the new Euro environment.

As I said in
my blog:

Now if
what I say is correct, then we cannot put Greece and other southern countries
on a firm footing once and for all, but rather
the slippage will occur indefinitely.

It is
clear that economic union cannot really happen effectively until the wealth of
the EU starts to converge, but within the present scenario, the inequalities
will in fact worsen, and it has to be the case that if an economic union needs
intermittently to mercilessly punish its weakest members, there has to be
something wrong with the underlying philosophy of that economic union.

I have in
this short paper tried to look at currency movements, since the problems of the
Eurozone directly relate to currencies.
Clearly more detailed analyses are required. For example the volatile movements between
1973-83 led to halving rates of around 12-14 years – probably due to
exceptional transport costs – but returned to more like 40-50 years in the
remainder of the century. But this
suggests that the following depreciations against the Deutsche Mark might have
occurred from 1999-2013, had there been no Euro:

country

distance

from
Frankfurt(km)

[German
av’ge 260km]

predicted
change

1999-2013

(50-year
halving rate)

predicted
change

1999-2013

(75-year
halving rate)

actual

change

1983-99

France

471

-15.3%

-10.5%

-11.2%

Italy

959

-30.6%

-21.6%

-40.0%

Ireland

1,086

-33.0%

-23.4%

-30.1%

Spain

1,437

-38.0%

-27.3%

-34.2%

Greece

1,804

-41.9%

-30.3%

-50.6%

Portugal

1,883

-42.6%

-30.9%

-58.4%

This table clearly shows the slippage within a free-trade
zone over a 15-year period. Italy
was showing signs of sluggishness around 2007, eight years after the start of
the Eurozone. And now, 15 years after
the start, France
is having difficulty recovering from the recent slump. Austerity measures are likely to aggravate France’s
problems, both in terms of trade and the deficit. Italy too.

And according to the model, London’s distance from Frankfurt
lies in between that of Paris and Rome, so we would have started having trouble
over the Euro around 2010, had we been in.